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We each have our sacred places, and I’ve discovered one of mine in Memphis, Tennessee. It is not Graceland. Early in February, Mrs. Big Beat and I are on a road trip across the southern United States. It’s been BBQ and live music — rockabilly in Austin, a Cajun jam in Lafayette, brassy jazz on […]

It’s Cher’s world and we’re just living in it. With more than a dozen costume changes, over-the-top-production numbers and a catalogue of pop songs that far surpasses most singers, Cher is a spectacle unto herself. And Saturday night at the Canadian Tire Centre, a chatty Cher proved to a nearly sold-out crowd that she’s not really done with performing.

Elvis will be in the house next Saturday for a journey through rock ‘n’ roll music history in support of two charities — Children at Risk and the Capital City Condors hockey team. The 13th annual Rockin’ for Risk is a retro rock dance party in support of children with autism or other special needs and their families.

The blues has a verifiable birthday this year, a big one. One hundred years ago, in March 1912, Dallas Blues was published in sheet music form. Many music historians cite the song, an instrumental by Hart Wand, as the first song written in the musical form’s 12-bar structure.

As well as dealing with everyday potholes and policy, it falls to some mayors of Canada’s major cities to navigate through a full-blown crisis when phrases such as “war zone” and “like a movie” become part of the general conversation. The current example is in Toronto where a meteorological crisis has taken over from a mayoral one. That city has had a power outage in all senses of the phrase for months now. In 2013, the outstanding example of responsible leadership was Calgary’s Mayor Naheed Nenshi in the summer flooding of Calgary. He was hyperbolically compared to a superhero. The mayor at the time of the 1998 Ice Storm, that moment frozen in time, was the same mayor we have now, Jim Watson. We got through that together and it provided us with a shovel full of stories to retell at the drop of a freezing rain. I myself went 10 days without electricity, cooked on a woodstove, and am still burning the fallen trees that bowed to the pressure. See what I mean.